Voters don’t want to cooperate, they want to dominate

The winners of the annual Bulwer-Lytton contest have been announced. This is a contest to come up with the worst opening sentence for a novel. It is in honor of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who opened his novel Paul Clifford with “It was a dark and stormy night.” Yeah, that’s the phrase that Peanuts character Snoopy used to open his stories. My favorites for this year are both from the same guy, who had a lot of entries chosen.

Stepping outside just after dawn, Chef Billingsworth was pleased to discover that for once the morning fog was not as thick as pea soup—or even lobster bisque for that matter—but was more a chicken velouté, or perhaps a beef remouillage. Mark Meiches, Dallas, TX To help maintain the spirit of the entire Apollo 15 crew during their lengthy and monotonous space journey, NASA scientists sent along fun snacks for everyone, including Space Food Sticks for the Lunar Astronauts and Space Food Milk-Bones for the Lunar Rover. Mark Meiches, Dallas, TX

My Sunday movie was Will & Harper a sweet documentary. I believe this is the first Will Farrell film I’ve seen, though, of course, I’ve heard about him. And this is a pretty good movie. When Farrell joined Saturday Night Live he met Andrew Steele, one of the writers. They said some of the stranger things Farrell did on the show and in later movies were Steele’s ideas. The two became good friends. During the pandemic, 27 years after their friendship started and at a time Farrell hadn’t seen his friend for a while, he got an email saying Steele has transitioned to female with the name Harper. She hoped they were still friends. Farrell responded yes, they were. Farrell proposed the idea of a cross-country road trip. During the long drive they could talk about her experience being trans. They could also visit various places so that Steele could get used to being in public as female with Farrell as support. As a man she had been across the country many times. But as female, would the country love her back? Yes, Will Farrell the comedian appears a few times, but mostly it is him being a very good and supportive friend as Steele tells her story. She’ll tell her friend anything he asks. She talks about recognizing she is trans in her late 50s. How happy she is to wake up after top surgery – puberty in four hours! She talks about wanting a place to hide so she could be a woman without condemnation from others. She explained her chosen name. She realizes that many places she visited as a man may not be safe for a woman, especially a trans woman. Along the way ... They visit the NBC studios and meet former SNL colleagues. They go to a Pacers game in Indianapolis and are introduced to Indiana’s governor. Only later do they find out how he has championed anti-trans laws. They visited Iowa City, where Harper grew up, and stayed with her sister. She visits a bar in Oklahoma and things go well. They visit a steakhouse in Texas and get a lot of mean tweets. In Albuquerque they have a hot air balloon ride. They end up at the ocean in Los Angeles. I am impressed at how much Farrell is the kind and supportive friend. This is a movie that explains the trans experience well. I’m glad they made it and hope America can learn from it. This one gets a solid recommendation. I wrote a couple days ago that creating a to-go bag is a good idea in case one must flee (or simply not want to live in an oppressive society) and include your passport in it. I realized that if you don’t have a passport or it is close to expiring, now would be a good time to get one. The upcoming administration will likely change the eligibility rules – a regime designed around oppressing those lower in the hierarchy won’t be able to do so if the peons flee (see: Berlin Wall). A passport is good for ten years. Many countries are reluctant to accept it if it is within six months of expiring. The media is still full of articles on why people voted the way they did, electing the nasty guy. I’m still ignoring most of them, though here are a few that make sense to me and say something similar to what I’ve been thinking. Paul Waldman, in The Cross Section on Substack calls on mainstream media to stop the votewashing, to stop making nasty guy voters look more virtuous than they are. From Waldman’s view these are the messages that 51% sent with their votes. We hate foreigners, especially non-white ones. We don’t like women either. We don’t mind being lied to. We love punching down on societies most vulnerable. We want leaders who hate the same people we hate. We don’t care if our leaders have no morality. The nasty guy promised to solve every problem people have and during his first term solved none of them, and that’s just fine with voters. We are wildly misinformed about the conditions in the country. Overthrowing the government is just fine. Fascism sounds awesome, so let’s try it.

If someone is upset about high grocery prices and their solution is “Let’s try fascism,” it doesn’t mean they don’t care about grocery prices, but it also means they’ve chosen fascism. And that’s a choice that shouldn’t be excused. I want to understand Trump voters; understanding why people make the choices they do is a central part of analyzing politics. But I refuse to apologize for them or paint their choices in the best possible light, especially when they are voting for the most corrupt, dishonest, and morally repugnant president in American history. And that’s exactly what much of the media is doing right now.

citixen of the Daily Kos community quoted an excerpt by David Frum of The Atlantic as another example of most of the media missing the point. Here’s part of that quote:

Don’t forget, this time around he’s a lawless potus. ... If MAGA controls the entire government, Democrats, and even plenty of Trump-voting Republicans, are only slowly going to realize: lawless executives are not going to allow democracy-as-we’ve-known-it to dislodge their majorities without real pain. We only have to look to the (sometimes bloody) civil rights era of the 50s and 60s to see what that looks like.

Kos of Kos wrote a two part opinion piece about how he understands what happened. In part 1 he wrote that there are things Democrats will have to think about. “Inflation is the new global third rail of politics.” Biden did a lot for unions but they didn’t love him back at full strength, so how to be the champion of the working class needs to be rethought. Infrastructure needs to be rethought. Support for Israel and Gaza need to be rethought, but didn’t make much difference in the result. There is a vast conservative noise machine and liberals have nothing comparable. Kos begged for investment in liberal media and told we already have the New York Times, which is accused of sanewashing the nasty guy, and NPR, which prides itself in being centrist. The lack of liberal media means there is little pushback when conservatives and conservative media twists liberal ideas and uses them as weapons. Another problem is the way liberals seem to be trying to right historical wrongs. The marriage equality effort changed public opinion strategically and gently. Current efforts seem to want to shame the public into agreement. An example is pushing “Latinx” even though most Latinos don’t like the term. There is also pushing proper pronouns for transgender people that sometimes is felt as a bludgeon.

There is a mass center of the American people struggling to get by, wondering why the Democratic Party is focused on things that feel irrelevant to them.

We should be able to condense everything down to a simple message, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did in his Second Bill of Rights:

Every American has the right to: 1. A job 2. An adequate wage and decent living 3. A decent home 4. Medical Care 5. Economic protection during sickness, accident, old age or unemployment 6. A good education

In part 2 Kos said Republicans had a simple message: Security. To explain why that worked Kos talked about his native El Salvador. The people overwhelmingly voted for Nayib Bukele, though he is Muslim in a Catholic country.

He took one of the most violent, dangerous peacetime countries in the world, and made it the safest in the Western Hemisphere. And he did that by calling a state of emergency and essentially eliminating all civil liberties, imprisoning virtually all young men. Yes, that cleaned up the streets of the violent cartels, but it also swept up innocent men with zero judicial review and threw them in a mega prison with a capacity of 40,000. The result?

Kos included a tweet from Bukele, that included a tweet by RadarHits, that said:

Just in: The murder rate in El Salvador falls from the world’s highest to the lowest in the Western Hemisphere – at 2.3 per 100k in 2023.

The highest was over 100 per 100k in 2015. Bukele added, “Strong men create good times…” As part of that effort he dissolved the country’s judiciary and created a rubber-stamping legislature. When Kos visited recently he talked to people about Bukele. Even if their friends and family got caught up in the dragnet they still supported him by massive numbers. Security beat freedom. What is the nasty guy selling is physical security (based on lies), economic security (his examples here are true), and cultural security (drag queens!). Most people don’t understand that the nasty guy’s solutions won’t fix their economic insecurity. Kos looked again at FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. Every item has to do with security. Security beat freedom. We can work with that. Long ago I saw the only thing the nasty guy is offering is a higher spot in the social hierarchy with permission to oppress those lower down. That’s it. That’s also a geeky way to say it. One can feel better about oneself by oppressing others. All of his policies are based on that. And most of those are designed to place himself in a higher position compared to those around him. He’ll lie on policy to get votes that will put him in positions of power. But he was incapable of lying about his true purpose – which is good for us who could read and understand his words. Bring the Lions of the Kos community has the same understanding, though it says it with a directness I like: The nasty guy offers domination. We ordinary people, at least the kind that try to stay reality-based, have to play by the rules. We can’t pretend the rules don’t exist.

Ah, but rich white guys can. Oligarchs like Musk can. Ride with Trump and his oligarch pals and you too can join them in breaking the rules. This is why Trump did not lose support as he was impeached, then charged, then found guilty. What was a clear liability in reality is an asset when you’re playing a game that you win when you show the rules don’t apply to you. MAGA, via Trump, is offering their supporters the chance to vicariously experience not just victory through Trump but what they want most of all: domination. The double standard is the point. The domination is the drug that keeps MAGA enthralled.

Harris offered joy and cooperation. Millions of voters wanted the opposite. They don’t want to cooperate, they want to dominate. Even against those we hate we want them and everyone to have good health care and housing. They want to be a part a movement to hurt others.

If you’re with him, you win- because he always wins. He gets away with it. He breaks the rules. He makes his enemies bend the knee and if they don’t he punishes him. ... If you are struggling economically, in a dead end job, living in one of many of the dire areas of this country, with no prospects of joining the “elite”- be it educational, cultural, or economic- MAGA is offering you a chance to feel it by being a part of a “movement” that will win and then dominate the people and groups on the other side.

People, not just white men without college degrees, beaten down by conservative economic policies that favor the rich want someone to get revenge for them against those living better than they are.

They wanted the satisfaction of “winning” and dominating. Trump always wins, and he bullies the losers. And millions of Americans, living on the edge, said give me that.

I hope you see the contradiction here. The nasty guy is offering domination – but not against the people who created the economic hardship these people are experiencing. His nature, his loyalties, his plans will make their lives worse.